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Wen Jiabao offers tribute to Hu Yaobang

By Sharon LaFraniere | The New York Times

Deng Xiaoping, left, and Hu Yaobang in 1981. Mr Hu’s death 21 years ago helped inspire the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. A tribute to Mr Hu was printed Thursday in China.File photo/Kyodo/Xinhua/China

He was the reformist party leader whose death 21 years ago helped inspire the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. To a large extent, both the protests and the leader — the former Communist Party general secretary Hu Yaobang — have been missing from China’s official political lexicon ever since.

So tens of thousands of Chinese took note on Thursday when a long and emotional tribute to Mr Hu — written by Prime Minister Wen Jiabao — was published Thursday in Renmin Ribao, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, otherwise known as People’s Daily.

“After all these years, finally someone is willing to say the right thing,” wrote a reader, one of more than 20,000 who posted comments on the article on the Chinese news portal Sina.com.

That observation may be a trifle dated: since 2005, Communist Party leaders have been rehabilitating the image of Mr Hu, who was forced out as Communist Party general secretary in 1987, two years before the Tiananmen demonstrations.

Still, Mr Wen’s flattering and public remembrance — splashed not just on the pages of People’s Daily, but on a clutch of popular national Web sites — appeared to some experts to nod not just to Mr Hu’s legacy as a man of the people, but perhaps to the party’s now-quiescent band of liberals.

Mr Hu helped inaugurate China’s early market-oriented economic changes, promoted many people purged under Mao and pushed political liberalization as a vital component of economic reform. Once viewed as the most likely successor to Deng Xiaoping as China’s leader, he was forced out of power by party conservatives who claimed his “bourgeois” leanings threatened the country’s stability.

Mr Wen’s essay deals with none of that. Instead, he described a 1986 trip with Mr. Hu, then 70, to an impoverished region. He recalled Mr Hu’s work ethic, stoicism and determination to pierce the pleasing facades created by lower-level officials and grasp the true conditions of the people. “The greatest danger for those who assume leadership is to be removed from reality,” he quoted Mr. Hu as saying.

Analysts poring over that and other parts of Mr Wen’s text were divided over their meaning. Some suggested it was an opening salvo in the political jockeying to choose China’s next generation of leaders, who will take office in 2012. Others saw in the essay a veiled jab at China’s current ruling elite, which has come under increasing fire for economic policies that, in some minds, favor the rich over average people.

The article could also be viewed as a calculated effort by China’s leadership to placate intellectuals, journalists and some retired party officials who still regard Mr Hu as a reformist unjustly shunted aside by more risk-averse bureaucrats.

“This is an attempt to co-opt those elements of the party and the party leadership who may be discontented with the pace of political reform,” said David Shambaugh, a George Washington University scholar who has written extensively on Chinese politics. “It is not a shot across the bow at anybody.”

Zhan Jiang, a journalism professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University, said that by paying tribute to the well-liked Mr Hu, the party might hope to enhance its image and “derive some moral resources for itself.”

Analysts agreed that Mr Wen’s eulogy was certainly screened and approved by the party’s top hierarchy.

What to say about Mr Hu has been an issue within the party since he lost his position as the party’s leader in 1987. Although his support for economic and political reforms won him popularity, his ousting and the fact that pro-democracy activists seized on his death in 1989 as an opportunity to demonstrate kept Mr Hu’s name out of the public domain for years afterward.

President Hu Jintao took the first steps in elevating the official memory of Hu Yaobang in 2005, when the party organised memorial services and a seminar to discuss his legacy. Hu Jintao and Hu Yaobang, who are not related, both considered the Communist Youth League, an important body within the ruling apparatus, to be their power base, and the move was seen as an attempt by the president to solidify support for his leadership.

But those actions were fairly modest, and they transpired only after a tense debate within the party’s Politburo over whether public commemoration of Mr Hu would reopen the wounds of 1989, Chinese party officials have said.

Mr Shambaugh argued that China’s leaders, while now honoring Mr Hu’s populist instincts, still ignored major parts of his legacy, including his comparatively liberal policy toward Tibet.

Yang Jisheng, 70, a former senior writer with the state-run news agency Xinhua and an author on Chinese politics, said Mr. Wen’s article was “a step forward,” but no harbinger of change.

“I do not hold out too much hope,” he said. “It is not a comprehensive review of Mr Hu’s career, which might have carried a more political message.”

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Published in The New York Times